Tragedy of the anti-commons occurs when property rules fail to enable efficient social coordination. In radio spectrum, rights issued to airwave users have traditionally been severely truncated, leaving gains from trade unexploited. The social losses that Ronald Coase (1959) asserted, appealing...

The Internet has devalued content to the point where it is often offered at no charge — newspapers, for instance — or widely misappropriated, as with music and movies. Either way, many people expect much of their content to be free. Why is this, how did it happen, and, focusing on music and...

The advent of telegraphy shifted news gathering from the public postal system to a private network dominated by telegraph companies and wire services, a nearly simultaneous revolution in journalism's technology and political economy. Postal news gathering had been open to all newspapers with few...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) pledged at its recent Mexico City meeting to establish an Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT). This team of 24 experts is responsible for developing and proposing protections for trademark holders. Such protections are needed...

An online provider’s termination of a user’s online account can be a major-and potentially even life-changing-event for the user. Account termination exiles the user from a virtual place the user wanted to be; termination disrupts any social network relationship ties in that venue, and...

America is in the midst of a “fantasy sports revolution” that is changing the way sports fans interact with one another. With more than 30 million Americans playing fantasy sports, today’s sports fans spend as much time predicting the performance of professional athletes as Wall Street...

Globally, the rapid rise of Open Source Software (OSS) development has drawn the intense attention of the public sector as well as the private sector. For a variety of policy reasons, governments throughout the world are now adopting various legislative and administrative strategies that support...

Why do some individuals pay for digital music while others pirate it? Using data on a sample of undergraduate students, we study the determinants of music piracy by looking at whether a respondent’s last song was obtained illegally. We first elicit our respondents’ willingness to pay (WTP)...

The proposed settlement of a copyright infringement suit brought against Google’s plan to digitize and make available of millions of books includes a structure under which Google sets access and sales prices and distributes revenues collects to rightsholders. The Department of Justice (DOJ)...

An important reason for the Internet's remarkable growth over the last quarter century is the "end-to-end" principle that networks should confine themselves to transmitting generic packets without worrying about their contents. Not only has this made deployment of internet infrastructure cheap...